February 12, 2021, NPR: Peter Prater's family wasn't thinking about COVID-19 when the call came that he had been taken to the hospital with a fever. It was April, and the Tallahassee Developmental Center, where Prater lives, hadn't yet had any COVID-19 diagnoses. Prater, 55, who has Down syndrome and diabetes, became the Florida center's first known case, his family said. Within two weeks, more than half of the roughly 60 residents and a third of the staff had tested positive for the virus, according to local news reports.
February 12, 2021, The Dartmouth: In order to have most lectures recorded, students used to need to secure accommodations from the College for a documented disability. Then COVID-19 hit — now, in the age of Zoom classes and asynchronous learning, recorded lectures are relatively routine.
February 12, 2021, 3DPrint.com: Today, 3D printing is a multibillion dollar industry, used in factories, research labs, and even in the depths of space. At the same time, amateur creatives are still using their desktop printers to make everyday miracles happen. Recently, Thingiverse designer Chad Lalande used an inexpensive desktop printer to make assistive tech for his blind dog: a set of plastic hoops that would prevent her from running into walls.
February 11, 2021, News-Press & Gazette Co.: Business accessibility is integral in winter weather, and that’s especially true for people with disabilities.
February 10, 2021, Queen City Nerve: Earlier this month, WBTV released an article that told the story of a local woman’s efforts to advocate for multiple interpreting systems in hospitals to help serve the deaf community at a time when mandated mask-wearing has made it nearly impossible for those who are deaf or hard of hearing to read lips.
February 10, 2021, CTV News–CA: Canadians need to get more comfortable with using the term “disabled people” to describe those who wish to be called that, advocates say. Over the past 10 to 15 years, disability advocates have embraced the term “disabled person” to describe members of their community instead of “people with disabilities” -- the go-to descriptor used since the 1960s.
February 10, 2021, UVA Today: Every student’s experience of the University of Virginia is unique. For some, accessibility and inclusion are key components, as opportunities across Grounds are not a one-size-fits-all. For many students, this is when the Student Disability Access Center comes in.
February 10, 2021, Firstpost: It was in August 2020 when the news about the #NewTeacherChallenge on TikTok began to make the rounds. In this challenge, parents were introducing their children to their new teachers, supposedly on Face Time. However, instead of showing them photos of their teachers, they were showing their children a rough-looking mugshot or picture of someone making a silly face. But sometimes, the photo/video was of people with disabilities.
February 9, 2021, New Atlas: Back in 2018, we heard about a full-size foldable wheel known as the Revolve. Its inventor, Andrea Mocellin, has now incorporated the technology into a wheelchair that folds down to fit inside an airliner's overhead baggage area.
February 9, 2021, The Guardian: When Callum Fullam, 18, was accepted as a mechanics apprentice by a well-known car dealership, he was delighted. But it wasn’t long before he realised that he was being treated very differently from his fellow apprentices. “I had to clean the workshop or do filing, while they were allowed to do the work they were hired to do,” he says.
February 9, 2021, Gamasutra: Have you ever been in a design meeting, and someone suggests a change or addition, only for another person to reply, “That would change the whole game!" or "That's not really part of the vision or concept”?
February 8, 2021, The Morning Call: For more than 80 years, the ironically titled Fair Labor Standards Act has institutionalized discrimination against people with disabilities in the workforce. The act endorses the practice of exploitation by paying people with disabilities substandard compensation, well below the minimum wage.
February 8, 2021, The Washington Post: For weeks, Warren “Wawa” Snipe, stood in front of his bathroom mirror replaying the same two songs and rehearsing every word. Ever since the National Association of the Deaf asked him last month to perform the national anthem and “America the Beautiful” in American Sign Language at Sunday’s Super Bowl pregame, Snipe, who is deaf, began studying the lyrics and translating them to ASL.
February 8, 2021, Verywell Health: Assistive technology (AT) includes a huge range of tools that can be helpful or even life-changing for people with autism. Defined under the Technology-Related Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1988 (Public Law 100-407), AT can be any item that "is used to increase, maintain, or improve functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities."
February 8, 2021, The Quad: Difficulty settings, adaptive controllers, subtitles. All of these things have one thing in common, and that is their purpose: to broaden the audience of the game and console. There has been a strange debate over the necessity of accessibility.
February 7, 2021, The Mainichi–JP: The Mainichi Newspapers' weekly "Braille Mainichi" publication has created a five-minute video recording the rare production process of Japan's only braille newspaper.
